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August 1919—Brooklyn-born Holloway Halstead Frost got his first attaboy when his Naval Academy (Class of 1910) diploma was inscribed “with distinction.” His byline appears twice in Proceedings in 1913, and between 1915-18 he wins an unprecedented two gold and two silver medals in the Institute’s annual essay contest. His four-part 1918 series “Letters on Naval Strategy” suggests that Frost has the same symptoms that afflict such naval officer-author luminaries as Mahan, Luce, Goodrich, and Fiske.
The publication this month of Frost’s “Letters on Staff Duty” fulfills all the bright promise. Still not yet 30, he has written a seminal paper that draws on the personal experience that brought him a Navy Cross in World War I. Frost will continue writing for 15 fruitful years, producing a torrent of articles, essays, and books on history, operations analysis, and shiphandling. He will command three surface ships, qualify for command of submarines, and be designated a naval aviator. In 1927, he will represent the United States at the Three-Power Naval Conference in Geneva. And then, in 1935, it ends. He is serving on the staff of the Command and General Staff School, Fort Leavenworth, when meningitis kills him. The last of his at- taboys comes from Admiral David Foote Sellers: “The Navy has suffered an irreparable loss ... In the language of the Fleet he loved . . . Well Done.”
The USS Frost (DE-144) won seven battle stars in World War II.
August 1939—Had Holloway Frost’s life not been cut short at 45, he surely would have continued to read and write about Jutland, the battle that fascinated him throughout his life. Four years after his death, a strong new voice, Lieutenant Franklin G. Percival enters the Jutland debate with this month’s “Fisher and His Ships.” Fisher is Admiral Sir John “Jacky” Fisher who, as First Sea Lord from 1904-10 and from 1914-15, rebuilt and rejuvenated the Royal Navy. His ships are those which, in mid-battle at Jutland, were critiqued by Vice Admiral David Beatty: “There’s something wrong with our bloody ships today, Chatfield.”
The things that were wrong on 31 May 1916 had been wrong with Fisher’s dreadnought battleships and battle-cruisers from the beginning. If Percival is right, Fisher was wrong about the kinds and qualities of warships he almost single-handedly decreed for the Fleet. More surprisingly, he seems to have misread his own experience with regard to the relative merits of speed and armor.
This jewel of a paper recalls the early Frost: elegant phrases and painstaking research. Rightly does Institute Secretary-Treasurer Captain G. V. Steward depart from his normally impartial tone in “Secretary’s Notes” to comment: “[Percival] has had a number of able articles in the Proceedings, but none better than the present one.”
August 1959—Both Frost and Percival, who died in 1952, would have found much to ponder in this month's “Know Thine Enemy” by Captain J. V. Heimark, U. S. Navy. To illustrate the role of wartime naval intelligence, Heimark analyzes several early World War II Pacific battles, including Coral Sea. To compulsive note-takers like Frost and Percival, Coral Sea contains echoes of distant thunder from Jutland, where British and Germans wound up in a Mexican standoff.
Jutland, the last great battle between surface ships, was fought in a single day; Coral Sea, the first battle fought with no direct contact between opposing ships, was a series of air searches and air strikes spread over six days. Both battles were marred by blunders—most caused by faulty, tardy, or absent intelligence. So flawed was the intelligence at Jutland that both the British and the Germans believed at the outset that their foe’s main battlefleet, just over the horizon, was back in harbor. Similarly, at Coral Sea, the two main carrier forces passed within 70 miles of each other, blissfully unaware of the other’s proximity.
Clay Barrow
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1989